This is an open question to all of you.  I haven’t thought about this in a while, but I was recently reminded of it and noticed that we haven’t heard much in the way of updates on the Iranian oil bourse.

The last I heard, a few months ago, was that Iran successfully opened the euro-denominated oil-trading bourse in a limited fashion on some small island in the Gulf.  That was this year.  What’s happened since then?  Can anyone corroborate this information?

What’s the Iranian Oil Bourse?

Apparently, Iran (and, as some speculators thought, also Iraq at one point pre-March-2003) has been planning for some time now (since at least before the latest war in Iraq) to trade oil in euros rather than dollars.  The rationale behind the attention this story attracts is that presumably, if traded in euros, oil-traders would have less need to keep any US dollars in their foreign reserves.  Instead they would load up on euros for their oil-trading and they would drop the dollars they don’t need.

Once countries start selling their US dollars, it’s a problem for the US Treasury because there would be less people keeping the US debt-boat afloat.  It’s no secret that the US owes the rest of the world more than the rest of the world owes the US.  That debt is growing at an alarming rate.  The US borrows something like a billion dollars a day just to pay interest on all of its foreign loans.  I’d say you can look this information up and verify it yourself, but alas, they have stopped publishing M3, which is the figure that represents the sum total of all US dollars in existence.

Whether or not this has anything to do with the US interest in Iraq and Iran is beside the point, for now.  It’s a much better idea to just stay tuned to developments in the oil bourse itself.  So, send them my way if you have hard updates.  This isn’t a story that seems to be followed in North American media very well.